currently
Zoho is the only company offering a complete office-suite on the web. the package includes Zoho Writer (text processor), Zoho Sheet (spreadsheets) and Zoho Show (presentations) as well as several additional utilities (chat, groupware, email-client, webpage-creator, CRM-tool, and PIM). quite an impressive lineup, even compared to what google offers. the advantage of getting all office-applications on a single web-platform is the same as with desktop-office-apps from one vendor: apps tend to be interoperable and users (should) only have to cope with a single interface.
Zoho Writer
the text-processor offers basic features regarding text-formats (font, size, color etc.), paragraph-alignment, listings and enumerations. image-upload and -positioning works smoothly, unlike the integrated table-editor which needs some improvements (f.e. I wasn’t able to delete multiple rows). Zoho Writer feels more like a richtext-editor for blogs than a fully-fledged word-processor, but compared to some competitors it offers some unique features, like (english) spell-checking and a search-and-replace function - both of high importance when planning to replace a desktop-word-processor. import of Word-files even messes up documents with simple layouts, export to PDF - the only way to print your documents - works quite good (though there’s a minor bug requiring to save your doc before exporting). Besides file-export, Zoho Writer allows to send documents to blogs (Wordpress, Typepad, LiveJournal…) or share them publicly/privately.
Zoho Show
Zoho’s presentation-builder contains similar text-formatting-options like the Writer-app. Zoho Show allows to create slide-templates containing headers, logos etc. which are applied to all individual slides. text, images and bullet-lists are organized in independent frames which can be freely dragged around the slide. however, the user-interface is quite clunky. editing the content of a text-frame requires to right-click the frame and select ‘edit’ - users familiar with Powerpoint and such will be alienated by such intricacy. slideshows can be viewed (almost-) fullscreen using cursor-keys and spacebar to swift through slides. Zoho currently offers no way to export slideshows.
Zoho Sheet
there are loads of competitors in the online-spreadsheet market (f.e. Google Spreadsheets or WikiCalc). Zoho Sheet offers most features you’ld expect a web-spreadsheet to contain: formatting of cells (very basic, f.e. no spanning cells), loads of numerical, logical and statistical functions and Excel-import (destroying complicated layouts though). what it differentiates it from similar products is the capability to draw basic charts (bar, pie, columns and line). Zoho Sheets exports to pdf, Excel and OpenOffice.
Zoho’s web-office-suite is easily the most complete offering in web-office to date. still, it’s hard to imagine users to replace their desktop-suite with Zoho: file-import of Microsoft Office-files only works with very simple files, printing documents by exporting to pdf is long-windend, and there are plenty of features even an average user will miss. most of these problems are shared by all upcoming web-office-apps I’ve seen to date. what’s a bit disappointing is the current low grade of integration within Zoho-apps. the user-interfaces of the three main-apps not only look very different, but also follow differing design-paradigms (f.e. Zoho Sheet doesn’t offer context-menus on right-mouse-clicks, while Show and Writer do). in addition, the supported features for sharing and exporting documents aren’t consistent among the apps.
still, I encourage everyone interested in web-office to try out Zoho, especially the Writer- and Sheet-apps offer unique features the competition doesn’t have (yet).
(read my other articles on office-is-dead)
